Calliope's blog

David Maisel and Beautiful Disasters

Calliope — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:28:40 +0000

American Mine (Carlin, NV 1), 2007

You must be thinking, "Gosh, that's marvelous! What is it?" Well, I'll give you some hints about what it's not. It's not a computer-generated image (so you can rule out "digital vat of candy for a Willy Wonka film"). And it wasn't captured by NASA on a trip to Neptune. If you guessed geode, then you're getting warmer, but you're still way off in terms of scale. Perhaps it looks to you like a place where a leprechaun might stash his gold? Well, strangely, that guess may be closest of all.

It turns out this absolutely mesmerizing photograph by David Maisel is an aerial view of a toxic manmade pond in Carlin Trend, Nevada, "the most prolific gold mining district in the Western Hemisphere" according to Maisel's website. The disorienting quality of the photo is a hallmark of Maisel's environmental photography, which explores the visually haunting, otherworldly transformations humans inflict on the Earth's surface. For decades, Maisel has been flying over and photographing sites of environmental wreckage, like the scored and chemically soaked basins of America's pit mines or the wasted lakebeds that once supplied Los Angeles with water. Beyond increasing awareness about these environmental disasters, Maisel's photographs enact a terrifying tug-of-war between ethics and aesthetics. As viewers experience and take pleasure in their sublime beauty, they are forced into the uncomfortable knowledge that these environmentally ruinous conditions have an irresistably attractive dimension.

The Lake Project 13

Image Credit: David Maisel

My good friend and fellow graduate student Michael Roberts introduced me to David Maisel via the Smithsonian's recent blog about the photographer's new retrospective collection, Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime. The beauty that Maisel locates in sites of terrestrial destruction--in the curves of a withered, polluted river or a network of cracks in the parched earth--instantly reminded me of the dilemma philosopher Elaine Scarry explores in her work on beauty and justice. Scarry argues that far from diverting critical attention from injustice, or masking it, beauty incites us to cherish and protect life. It seems to me that Maisel's photographs push the limits of this theory by positing the majesty and allure of catastrophic environmental wounds. If the very evidence of environmental devastation is made to look beautiful then what will compel us to save these endangered places?

It's difficult to articulate exactly how Maisel's photographs make me feel; but I can say that I don't feel complacence. Perhaps because most of the landscapes paradoxically appear beautiful while revealing signs of trauma, or a kind of pain, they allow us to consider both sensations in our minds at once. Maisel's photographs poignantly capture the dignity and beauty of the Earth even when it's under duress. And what could be more pathetic than that?

Image Credit: Jerry Ting

Maisel's work will remind anyone who has flown over the country of the strange views they've seen out the window. Personally, I think of the colored geometric pools that greet incoming planes at the San Francisco airport. I always enjoy looking at these lily-pad-like fields of water, but never knew what they were until Maisel's photos prompted me to investigate. It turns out these colored pools are industrial salt ponds, one-hundred-year-old evaporating receptacles for harvesting sea salt. They get their coloration from algae and other organisms living within them that express different colors depending on the saline levels in the pool. Though they are a historic part of the South Bay and make for a beautiful spectacle from overhead (see the image captured by an airplane passenger above) the salt ponds pose a major disturbance to the natural wetland habitat that preexisted them.

Image Credit: Save the Bay Blog

In 2003, California and federal agencies reclaimed a huge area of the shoreline for the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project which aims to return these altered sections of shoreline to a more natural state. The effects of this project are already visible from a bird's-eye vantage (as the photo juxtaposition above illustrates). In a weird way, the SF Salt Pond Restoration Project feels like an "undoing" of the beauty Maisel's photographs cull out of industrial landscapes. But surely we shouldn't lament the strides these dedicated environmentalists have made towards renewing the wetlands habitat, even if they mean that the South Bay will lose its landmark look. Some will prefer the aesthetic and/or nostalgic value of the "before" shot to the "after" shot despite what their conscience tells them. But the tension between our aesthetic preferences and our ethical gut isn't something we should necessarily suppress. At least that's what Maisel's photographs seem to suggest.

The Many Leaning Subjects of Arnold Newman

Calliope — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:39:51 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Porch and Chairs, West Palm Beach Florida, 1941

In between portraits of famous luminaries at the Harry Ransom Center's Arnold Newman Masterclass exhibit, there are a group of images from the photographer's early career that feel anonymous and private. They include pictures of landscapes, nameless figures, and modest structures--all subjects that seem to have been chosen for their compositional character rather than the associations they bring to mind. The above photograph from that period of a decontextualized porch and chairs resists our curiosity to see the whole house and place it in a particular setting, focusing us instead on form and line. The un-forthcomingness or formal starkness of this picture seems dramatically foreign to the photography of Newman's later career, the period of his well-known "environmental" portraits, which situated iconic individuals in settings that explained or extended their identities. (Rachel's post further glosses and complicates this term). Despite this, I'd like to point out some unifying threads between this quaint little study from West Palm Beach and a few, more recognizably Newmanian photographs, all of which are currently on display at the Ransom Center.

"Porch and Chairs" derives its charm from a few compositional elements. The first is the picture's close crop. Newman left a very small margin around the porch, especially to the right and left, which highlights its distorted shape. The lateral boards at the top of the photo give us the sense that Newman's camera is held level, but all of the lines one would expect to be vertical in the picture--the shutters, the right and left panels of the door frame, the porch's central support and the two cut-away walls--are slanted, making the structure appear unstable and droopy. Our eyes search the bowed and jagged siding for ninety degree angles to no avail. As much as they purport to be squares, the spaces within the porch frame are more like rhombuses that lean faintly to the left. Yet the tilted aspect of the porch doesn't overwhelm or unsettle the photo, because the two chairs in the lower right corner "lean" in the opposite direction. These backward-bending chairs may have no effect on structural soundness of the rickety building but they do provide the balance needed within the composition.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Pablo Picasso, painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Vallauris, France, 1954.

The crop planned here, which resulted in the famous Picasso portrait below, accomplishes something a little different from the "Porch and Chairs" framing. Newman begins with an image of a leaning subject, reorients it, and restores balance and energy to the painter's mien. Even after these modifications, there are still signs that he was leaning over in the original pose. The rightward pressure of Picasso's hand visible in the creases on his forehead offsets the positioning of the subject toward the left side of the frame. The hand, in other words, acts as a frame-within-a-frame that repositions and counterbalances the visual weight of the leaning subject.

Image Credit: www.mymodernmet.com

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Ernest Trova, Sculptor, Pace Gallery, 1971

Several other Newman portraits at the Harry Ransom Center feature leaning subjects and frames-within-frames. In this photograph of the sculptor Ernest Trova, for instance, the white jutting walls of the gallery (instead of Newman's red crayon) crop nearly half of his body from view, and what's left of Trova's trunk is pictured leaning against this "environmental" frame. We get the sense that the thrust of his lean is the only thing keeping him from being squeezed out of the picture.

Image Credit: www.mymodernmet.com

In this shot, Ansel Adams appears comfortably wedged between a beam and the frame of a sliding glass door. Behind him and inside his house a group of frames hang on the wall. The placement of the photographer in front of a pane of glass that, in turn, superimposes reflections of the trees outside on the framed artworks within the house suggests a communicability between each of these layers that may refer to Adams' work. Indeed, capturing the photographer, his beloved trees, and the art on his walls within the same bounding line suggests the inseparability of all of these things.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Joel Meyerowitz, photographer in his studio, New York, 1993

This final photograph of Joel Meyerowitz leaning against what must be the entry to his darkroom emboldens me to talk more directly about the importance of leaning and internal frames for Newman's work. From a compositional standpoint it seems to me that, like the tilted porch frame and the crooked-backed chairs of our first image, the lean and the frame of Newman's later pieces give them a crucial sense of counterpoise. In Newman's portraits of artists, these frame-like structures inevitably take on a more definite significance because of the inescapable relationship between artists and frames. Deliberately positioning these art makers within at least two sets of frames--the borders of Newman's photograph and what I've been calling its internal frame--emphasizes the fact that they have momentarily relinquished artistic control and have become art. Perhaps leaning or pushing back against the frame is the only way they can reassert a modicum of control.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Surface and Appearance in "Accidental Racist," Part 2

Calliope — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:11:24 +0000

Image Credit: plus.google.com

At the end of my last post I promised to examine Brad Paisley and LL Cool J's controversial duet "Accidental Racist" in light of Paisley's 2011 "Camouflage" homage. This follow-up post offers that analysis as well as some context from Paisley's pop-country contemporaries and a recent national dialogue about race.

Sharing its name with the garb of hunters and soldiers, Paisley's lighthearted single from the album "This is Country Music" sounds, at first blush, like it would be anything but progressive. You might think only a select crowd could rally around a song that celebrates an aesthetic so closely associated with guns and stealth. But if we listen closer, the song stretches the application of camouflage into unexpected places where it creates an atmosphere of social inclusiveness. Let's see how this plays out.

In the first verse of the song an un-"cool" kid named Kevin makes a successful bid for popularity by pulling up to his high school parking lot with "his entire Chevy Cavalier" painted camouflage. The crowd cheers and Paisley exclaims, "camouflage - it disappears when it pulls out of his garage!"

Camo-bedecked high schoolers show up in the next verse too. Paisley croons,

I asked Jenny to the prom and her mom knew how to sew

So she mad a matching tux and gown from Duck Blind Mossy Oak

We took pictures in the backyard before we went to the dance

And the only thing that you can see is our faces and our hands

The final quatrain moves into a different register, away from teenagers and their efforts to fit or blend into their social environments to symbols of regional and national identity. The song slows down as Paisley concedes, "well the stars and bars offend some folks and I guess I see why." His reluctance to denounce the Confederate Flag outright is puzzling. But perhaps this is the kind of "tact" Paisley needs to use in order to get his largely southern, white fan-base to buy into the alternative flag he wants to propose:

Nowadays there's still a way to show your southern pride

The only thing as patriotic as the old red white and blue

Is green and gray and black and brown and tan all over too

Given the way camouflage functioned earlier in the song, as an invisible social glue that attracts even as it allows anxiety-producing social objects (outfits for prom, the car one drives to school) to fade away, we're encouraged to read the camo-colored flag as performing a similar kind of social function. Characterizing camouflage as his "favorite color" and adding that it is "designed by Mother Nature and by God," the singer makes the humorous claim that it is naturally occuring and divinely inspired. But the joke may have a deeper significance. By refering to camouflage as a single color that comprises "black and brown and tan" shades, the song also advocates for replacing old racist symbols of "southern pride" with symbols of a racially and ideologically diverse place. In the far-fetched, humorous universe of the song, camouflage is the means by which to reject exclusivity in favor of inclusion.

Paisley's struggle to find an acceptable outlet for "southern pride"--which he says is clouded by "southern blame" in "Accidental Racist"--may seem like a strange fixation. But it's a theme that is dear to Nashville country and has been handled in far less considerate or creative terms. Take for instance Eric Church's single "Homeboy," released the same year as "Camouflage." Adapting the biblical story of the prodigal son, the singer pleads with the title character--presumably his little brother--to return home from his wayward life on streets. Like Paisley's songs, Church's tune uses racialized clothing items and physical appearance to signal racial difference. But unlike "Accidental Racist," Church's song doesn't express difference through white and black characters; instead it sets up a strong antagonism between American farm life and hip-hop-influenced, urban culture.

Let's take a quick look at the lyrics. The singer's initial appeal to his brother mocks the urban style adopted and/or popularized by black hip-hop artists:

You were too bad for a little square town

With your hip-hop hat and your pants on the ground

Heard you cussed out mama, pushed daddy around

before you tore off in his car

Here you are running these dirty old streets

Tattoo on your neck, fake gold on your teeth

Got the 'hood here snowed, but you can't fool me

We both know who who you are

Later on in the song the singer counters the gold teeth and the baggy pants of the "'hood" with fixtures of a white, small-town existence: hard work, cold beers, hay bales, and trucks by the lake.

Even though LL Cool J and Brad Paisley work with the same sartorial imagery (Cool J tells us his pants are "saggin'") they actively reject the "us versus them" mentality of a song like "Homeboy." They do this by invoking stereotypically black or white clothing items (cowboy hats, a Skynyrd t-shirt, saggy pants, do-rags, and gold bling) and, without disparaging them, acknowledging that these are proverbially just the cover of the book. Paisley's line,

I try to put myself in your shoes and that's a good place to begin

But it ain't like I can walk a mile in someone else's skin,

captures the way the song treats dress versus more permanent forms of racial identity. Walking in someone's shoes, or in their do-rag or cowboy hat, isn't a meaningless gesture and neither should these objects be left out of a conversation about race. But "Accidental Racist" also refuses to absolve us of the ugliest kind of discrimination--not just judgment based on clothing, but judgment based on skin color.

Image Credit: www.cbsnews.com

If there's any doubt about whether clothing or appearance is a legitimate place to start a dialogue about race, just recall the murder of Florida teen Trayvon Martin that occured just over a year ago and the national "hoodie" movement it inspired. If anything LL Cool J and Brad Paisley do well to remind us that appearance, whether it is racial or cultural, still triggers prejudice and fear. How can we deny the emotional basis of a simple wish like this, "Just because my pants are saggin' doesn't mean I'm up to no good / You should try to get to know me, I really wish you would"?

Surface and Appearance in "Accidental Racist," Part 1

Calliope — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:23:37 +0000

Image Credit: Mark Humphrey, AP

The media reacted volubly to Brad Paisley's song "Accidental Racist," a ballad on his newly released "Wheelhouse" album that openly tackles the problem of racism. Staging a dialogue between Paisley and rapper LL Cool J, the song imagines the tense process of "remembering and forgetting" slavery, as one critic put it, from highly stereotyped white and black perspectives. Many voices from the blogosphere last week, including Stewart and Harris from Jezebel and Slate, fumed at the song's presentation of racial history and relations, while others viewed it as simply a provocative song characteristic of Paisley's other work. That it was selected by the NYTimes.com for one of the online "Room for Debate" forums is, perhaps, an indication of how ripe the song's lyrics are for critique and how generative they are of competing rhetorics.

Here I will consider how controversial lyrics from "Accidental Racist" alongside resonant verses from Paisley and other mainstream country artists foreground surfaces and appearances--clothing, physique, and color, for instance--to talk about identity, race, and social perceptions.

Image Credit: www.bet.com

One of the verses from "Accidental Racist" that has caused contention is Cool J's line, "If you don't judge my gold chains / I'll forget the iron chains." Critics object to the implication that white people overlooking a "black" fashion choice is somehow equivalent to black people forgetting about slavery altogether. Setting aside the offensiveness of this equation, I'd just like to point out that the line centers around a clothing accessory and also the suggestion that while such objects can inspire misjudgment and misunderstanding they can also be imbued with meanings that have deep consequences for race relations. I would argue that the song's frequent references to racialized apparel--a white cowboy hat, "invisible white hoods," a Skynyrd t-shirt with a red confederate flag on it, saggy pants, and a do-rag--are not so accidental, and that they fit in with a tendency in Paisley's work to appropriate and explode a certain kind of visual stereotype.

Take for instance, Paisley's tune "Online" from his 2007 album "Fifth Gear." Seemingly just a goofy song about online dating it actually engages with larger questions about anonymity, identity, and personal interaction on the Web, and it does so primarily by parodying the way we enhance our digital appearances.

The song begins with its protagonist enumerating what he calls his "stats," details about his height, weight and livelihood:

I work down at the pizza pit

And I drive an old Hyundai

I still live with my mom and dad

I'm 5'3 and overweight

Despite this profile, which, within the heteronormative frame of the song is represented as hopelessly pathetic, the singer is buoyed by the way he looks online:

'Cause online I'm out in Hollywood

I'm 6'5 and I look damn good

I drive a Maserati

I'm a black belt in Karate

And I love a good glass of wine

The sketch of the subject's "real" appearance and that of his constructed online persona present radically different versions of maleness; the one resembles adolescence and the other independence and success. Yet the descriptions are similar in their form and artificiality; neither evokes an image of a real person but rather two poles of a cartoonish spectrum of male desirability. Thus, beyond the song's main lesson--that people "grow another foot" and "lose a bunch of weight" when they portray themselves online--is the notion that a list of personal "stats," like the sort found on Facebook or used to size up a date, fail to express a person's true identity even though they can help with reinvention, profilerating online a "whole 'nother me."

The basic paradox presented in "Online," that while appearances are only skin deep they have real effects and consequences, also underlies the interplay between appearance and perceptions in "Accidental Racist." Paisley articulates the paradox when he apologizes to the black man he meets behind the Starbucks counter,

When I put on that t-shirt, the only thing I meant to say is I'm a Skynyrd fan

The red flag on my chest somehow is like the elephant in the corner of the south

In my next post on this subject, I'll look at Paisley's 2011 song "Camouflage" to further examine his interest in fabric and color and their ideological freight.

What's so original about "original series"?

Calliope — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 00:35:39 +0000

Image Credit: screenshot capture of NYTimes.com

This was one of the ads on my NYTimes.com edition today. Upon first glance it appears to be a simple ad for an e-book by Amy Harmon called Asperger Love, but the New York Times masthead and the words "Byliner Original" suggest that the Asperger Love is an in-house publication. And that's just what it is: an "e-single" written by a NYTimes journalist, packaged for Kindle, iBooks, and Nook, and hosted on a partner site, Byliner.com.

Image Credit: screenshot capture of byliner.com

Asperger Love is the third piece in the Times' e-singles program which is being piloted this year. I suppose the idea behind creating the series is to capitalize on the talent and ambition of the Times staff by keeping their longer non-fiction projects in-house. The program also seems to extend the NYTimes' existing model to a more generalized hybrid, moving from a media site to a media publisher and retailer. Maybe the only way to survive as an online newspaper today is through price segmentation and product diversification. Gone are the days when $3.75 would get you the whole daily scoop (well, maybe you still find newsprint copies of the Times at airports). Now online customers pay different premiums for extra or alternative content, bundled in various ways, and for spin-off products like the The New York Times / Byliner Originals.

In one light, it's pretty cool that readers now have the option to "follow" a favorite journalist and read what they're writing on the side. This will enable these writers to establish greater loyalty and name recognition among NYTimes readers (a sizeable audience). But what about reaching new readers? Is it possible that the NYTimes e-singles editions will become so independently popular that they will attract customers who do not already know and trust the brand?

I have the same question about the Netflix Original series, a similar bid to extend Netflix's function as a video streaming and distribution company to a full-scale production company. What's the payoff for Netflix? Is the point just to make current customers (like me!) a lot happier now that we can watch Kevin Spacey in a new series on Netflix Instant? Or is this original series meant to draw in new users? With a budget of $100 million or thereabouts, something tells me House of Cards is meant to accomplish the latter. But what makes these new Netflix and NYTimes products different from, for instance, Lifetime original movies or the Target brand soap you buy in lieu of Dove? I would be surprised if either Lifetime or Target acquires a significant number of new customers solely through these "original" products.

The success of the NYTImes and Netflix campaigns, I suppose, is a matter of ethos. Does The New York Times want to be seen as a company that sells content simply by the force of its brand, a strategy that big retailers have used to offer cheaper, no-frills versions of products they carry in their own stores? Perhaps it does. Perhaps The New York Times and Netflix are such strong brands--brands that benefit from the celebrity of the actors and writers associated with them--that their original series will thrive like no other original series ever has before.

Image Credit: screenshot capture of Netflix.com

Ads on Bodies and Bodies in Ads at SXSW

Calliope — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 18:53:27 +0000

Image Credit: Magic Spoon Production's Vimeo

Few things will make a body more aware of its need of personal space than being in Austin during SXSW. At the height of the music festival, sixth street is a throbbing mass of bodies; most are hurting from the night before; many are pierced and tattooed; and all are in search of further sensory stimulation. Prominence and/or density of bodies are signal features of large scale cultural gatherings like SXSW. Consequently, advertising at these sorts of events often becomes embodied in visually arresting and sometimes ethically questionable ways. This post examines two advertising schemes that came to my attention this SXSW, and thinks about the stakes--rhetorical and otherwise--of confusing bodies with commercial products.

When I was looking around online last week for information about free SXSW shows I noticed that one of the kick-off parties was sponsored by a company called Bald Logo. The name sounded funny so I did some investigating. It turns out the founder Brandon Chicotsky is an Austin resident (pictured above) who sells ad space on his bald head. To rent Chicotsky's scalp, or the scalp of one of his promoters dubbed the "Baldangelicals," it costs $320/day. Apparently, these guys walk around the "highest density foot traffic areas of the city" promoting whatever brand they've temporarily stamped on their heads.

The company calls what they do "animate social marketing," which highlights the fact that these bald guys are moving targets. But the word 'animate' also strikes me as a trivializing and evasive way of describing the medium that distinguishes this kind of advertising from more stable and/or conventional forms: the human body. In addition to being animate bodies are feeling, thinking, profoundly individual, and a million other things. So, a more honest tagline for Bald Logo might read, "social marketing with human bodies." But somehow that sounds a touch too exploitative.

Image Credit: www.bizjournals.com

Bald Logo's business concept raises a lot of questions, not the least of which is why SXSW has attracted similar schemes for monetizing human bodies in the past. Recall the Homeless Hotspots controversy of SXSW 2012 which involved paying homeless people to wear Wi-Fi transmitters in busy parts of town. Whether hawked by bald guys or homeless people, company brands and their services are just millimeters away from surgically attaching themselves to human bodies. This might be a scary thought for some, but perhaps not for the thousands of people lining up to wear a computer called Glass on their faces.

You might say that Bald Logo is intentionally gimmicky, so gimmicky that it should not be taken seriously. But it is through gag humor that the company openly normalizes the sale of human bodies (witness their slogan "purchase ad space on a bald head"). And how could seeing ads on people's heads possibly not degrade our notion of personhood? When someone is called a blockhead, or an airhead, or methhead (significantly, I can't come up with any positive head terms) the idea conveyed by the noun prefix subsumes the whole person, not just the head. So the question is, who wants to be an adhead?

Image Credit: prweb.com

Bald guys, apparently. But I'll stop picking on them for a minute. There are other advertising spectacles worthy of note like the monstrosity pictured above, which was at SXSW this year and last. It's an official SXSW stage made to look like a giant Doritos vending machine. So instead of advertising that enters or becomes incorporate with the body (like the Bald Logo decals) we have a humongous ad with real bodies inside of it.

As much as I'm uncomfortable with the corporatization of SXSW I have to hand it to whoever was behind the heavy-handed metaphorics of this stage. They basically created a giant monument to consumerism, replete with an audience that feeds on the corporate-sponsored music (and the bodies making this music) as they would toxic-colored, manufactured chips. But the people at the Doritos stage were either oblivious to these implications or perfectly okay with them. For those who are somewhat more mindful of how bodies are being used for commercial purposes, keep your eyes open at the next SXSW. The examples are everywhere.

Handwriting: What's it good for?

Calliope — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:20:19 +0000

Image Credit: Birdsedge First School

Remember these things? It's hard to believe that kids are still learning to shape their letters according to handwriting diagrams like this one. In the first world where type is the dominant mode of textual presentation, one has to wonder how often kids will encounter a squiggly 'f' as it's drawn above or a lower case 'k' that looks like a capital R?

The chart looks to us like an anachronism, especially next the digital text of this blog post. We're prompted to ask whether kids should be taught to write a script that is rapidly fading from the textual universe? Is handwriting a skill that is worth acquiring in an era when written communication mainly occurs through digital media, without the assistance of pen or paper?

Image Credit: www.bellafigura.com

One compelling argument for keeping handwriting around is that it can be very pretty, and therefore affective. A friend's wedding invitation came in the mail recently and it got me thinking about the decorative and emotional value of handwriting. The envelope was addressed in beautiful cursive, a standard touch for formal invitations 20 years ago but certainly not the norm today. Now couples often have their envelopes labelled with digital fonts or will deliver invitations entirely online. It's only the occasional couple who busts out the fountain pen and ruler and puts their cursive skills to work. In my book this doubles the couple's charm factor as well as increases the likelihood that I will attend their wedding. There's something about the slightly imperfect symmetry of handwritten script that marks a card as personal, and this consideration for the guest I think presages a good wedding party. (On the other hand, an open bar probably has more to do with a successful wedding reception than the writing on the invitation).

Another case where I think the handwriting remains rhetorically impactful is in letter writing. Someone recently told me about how their sister's fiance asked her father for permission to marry her in a handwritten letter. This made me wonder whether handwriting, especially in the Digital Age, lends writers a particular gravitas that printed text does not. Students of literary manuscripts will tell you that handwriting can reveal a good deal about a writer's process; small variations or mistakes can show where the writer hesitated, where s/he struggled to find the right expression, where s/he wrote with confidence. Perhaps, then, it is a more honest medium than type because it betrays these writerly hiccups rather than masking them with uniform letters. The appearance of honesty, openness, and having thought about what one has said are all things I imagine one wants to cultivate when asking a man for his daughter's hand.

Image Credit: www.etsy.com

Did the handwritten form of prisoner Kim Millbrook's petition to sue the federal government work in his favor? After the felon's case was rejected by lower courts (he is suing the government as the employer of a group of prison guards who he claims sexually assaulted him at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa.) the Supreme Court picked up his "pauper's petition" which was written rather pathetically in longhand. In a case like this where the federal courts' so-called immunity from prisoners' allegations is at issue, the rudimentary style in which Millbrook addressed the Justices underscores his cause. His crude petition highlights the basic imbalance of resources, power, and human rights that always exists between a prisoner and the federal government.

The last thing I want to say about handwriting is that as much as technology has seemed to erase the need to write legibly with paper and pen, the impetus to take handwritten notes to record and organize one's thoughts is still remarkably strong. It's strong enough to power a whole market of note-taking applications, such as Penultimate or Notability, which allow iPad users to write on all kinds of digital surfaces (pdfs, presentation slides, websites, etc.).

So, in summary, it seems like handwriting is not going away anytime soon. But its utility and cultural significance have certainly changed. We rely on it less and less as a medium for communicating content audiences as we have become increasingly bad at deciphering other people's handwriting. As rhetors, we occasionally exploit the presentation value of handwriting to add gravity, romance, or pathos to our appeals. And finally, functionally speaking, I wonder if the only advantages handwriting has over typing are its mnemonic characteristics--its flexibility, variability, and particularity--which would seem to narrow its field of usefulness to notes that are meant only for oneself.

Photographs of the Willard Suitcases

Calliope — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 23:59:12 +0000

Image Credit: Jon Crispin

Beaten up, bulging, and with one latch ajar, this old suitcase beckons to be opened. It was closed for a long time, deposited with its owner in 1953 at the Willard Asylum for the Insane near Seneca Lake, NY. This and around 400 other suitcases that belonged to the asylum's patients sat for many years, forgotten in the attic of the defunct facility until discovered in the mid-1990s. After being exhibited publically for the first time in 2004, many of the suitcases are now temporarily in the care of Jon Crispin who has undertaken to photograph the collection. The images in this post are from Crispin's blog which chronicles his experience inspecting and documenting the personal effects of the Willard patients.

Image Credit: Jon Crispin

On his blog, Crispin visually "unpacks" the suitcases for viewers, first presenting their tough-looking exteriors, then their inner compartments and finally, through close ups, individual items themselves. This photographic unveiling seems intended to simulate the experience of first discovering and opening the parcels (some of which date back to the 1920s). The open-face pictures have a luminous quality that evokes the revelatory experience of opening a present, or hoisting up the lid of an old costume box. Like beautiful clamshells, the suitcases cradle their contents in a visually striking way. Most are lined with fabric or pretty yellowed paper which gives the objects strewn inside them a personal, familiar, and strangely cheerful feel.

The paraphernalia radiate cheeriness in spite of, or almost in defiance of, the fate of institutional confinement that lurks behind each photograph. There are plenty of generic items in the cases, like hair combs and safety pins, but also stuff that has a very personal logic to it: biographically significant items that suggest the suitcase owners led full and interesting lives, at least before they were "put away." The case at the top of the page for instance belonged to a Ukrainian emigree who we know made a model of a church from his native country and gave it to President Truman. (The model was apparently impressive enough to find a home in a government building in Washington). The patient was also a prodigious painter while at Willard, which makes his collection of postcards, photos, prints and souvenirs of special interest. It is interesting to think of this case as an artistic wellspring, a physical container of ideas from the outside world that, at some point, might well have found their way into the patient's creations. More fascinating still is the notion that this artist's private suitcase has become, under Crispin's artistic supervision, a still life in its own right.

Image Credit: Jon Crispin

This green suitcase, or sturdy trunk rather, belonged to a World War II veteran named Frank who was living in Brooklyn in 1945 when the police committed him to the psych wards for publically protesting a social slight. Even before I read about his tragic story, Frank's suitcase stood out to me because his possessions somehow make him seem knowable, even present. The miniature note books, the shipping tags, the posed photographs, and scraps brought back from serving overseas all suggest that he liked to thoughtfully record and remember experiences.

Frank's nostalgia, his comfortable air behind the camera, his propensity for self-portraiture and interest in memorabilia make him feel almost like a peer of ours, say, a person who would feel right at home using Instagram. But there's something eery about how close he feels to us. It's almost as if Frank, or whoever packed his suitcase, knew that it would become a time capsule of sorts, the only means through which future generations would get to know the handsome, dignified man in the photographs. I wish I could thank him for leaving us such a beautiful object-memoir of his life.

Image Credit: Jon Crispin

What do start-ups look like?

Calliope — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 20:43:08 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot capture from insidestartups.org

In a recovering service economy like ours, young job seekers face a different set of choices than they might have a decade or two ago. The prohibitively high cost of obtaining a traditional college degree--along with a lot of other economic factors--are changing not only the kinds of educational models available to young people, but also the career paths they are taking. One of the more common entry points to the workforce these days are Internet start-ups. Relative to their size they are better job creators than established companies and offer attractrive employment for all kinds of talent, from Ivy League grads to self-taught computer programmers.

If these sorts of trends interests you, there are plenty of ways to keep tabs on the start-up sector; TechCrunch, Venture Beat, and the New York Times Bits Blog aren't bad places to start. The coverage you'll see in these publications is focused on companies' products and business strategies. If you're interested in the culture of start-ups--the selling point for so many employees--then the visual database insidestartups.org is the place to look. This searchable gallery of start-ups, designed to connect companies and employees, is the best way to visualize the industry from a macro point of view, but also from the inside out. I recently used the site to teach rhetorical analysis, but its content strikes me as valuable in other ways. The website's prominent montage of profile pictures gives viewers a macro sense of the new startup "cohort," and individually, the images suggest possible values and directions for the new American workplace.

Image Credit: Screenshot capture from insidestartups.org

The website is organized like a social network, with an image and associated page for each business. Visitors can search for specific kinds of start-ups by selecting for location, company type, funding round, etc. Some businesses place their logos front and center to attract recruits; others showcase their office space. The average picture of a start-up working space is what you would expect: there are no divisions between individual work stations, and employees crowd around an assortment of Mac devices to harness the wisdom of the team. Some pictures are surprisingly honest about the humble working conditions that come with the territory. (See Riffle's picture, up top, of a lonely desk and MacBook).

Image Credit: Screenshot capture from insidestartups.org

But as with all emblematic representations, these images can't be taken at face value as direct windows onto start-up life. Each advocates for the "philosophy" or "culture" of particular start-up company, and a significant number do this by projecting a unique brand of "fun." Many featured companies convey their fun sides by channelling the college fraternity (see Mojotech's bro huddle above) or posing as enthusiastic camp counselors (see Getglue, second screenshot, top right). But for every few pictures of togetherness--the kind you thought only existed in freshman dorms--there's an image that suggests hard work, dedication, even sacrifice (see Datadog's picture of a lone worker manning an empty, cluttered office). Whether or not these representations are faithful to reality, the members of Inside Startups presumably know how to appeal to bright young employees. By cultivating the appearance of a collegiate atmosphere are they offering a substitute for college to those who never experienced it? Or are they just catering to twenty-somethings that don't want to leave the warm embrace of college behind?

It can't give us the whole picture, but Inside Startups is certainly an informative source for educators who aim to prepare students for future careers. Knowing the look and feel of these careers seems like a necessary part of this pedagogical effort.

A Day for Love and Wit

Calliope — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 05:18:23 +0000

Image Credit: salon.com

Today is National Eros Day. If all goes as planned couples everywhere will exchange love tokens, consume chocolate, and passionately express their love for one another. Even if we poke fun at them, these are some of the conventions of Valentine's Day just like grilling and fireworks are conventional for the Fourth of July. But Valentine's Day is a peculiar holiday because many of its conventions--and certainly its iconography--are literary (instead of religious, nationalistic, or folkloric). To my knowledge it's the only widely celebrated holiday that, simply by virtue of its subject matter, has its own well-established poetic tradition and form: the tradition of courtly love poetry and the form of the sonnet. I ask the reader to accept this slightly shaky premise as I make the claim, just for fun, that Valentine's Day makes us all into poets.

I didn't say good poets. The Valentine's Day-inspired "poems" I will discuss here are hardly traditional, and perhaps not very clever. But poets have always insisted that their declarations of love are bungled and artless. Renaissance sonneteer Sir Philip Sidney says that idolizing one's love in verse is for fools "who fare like him that both / Lookes to the skies, and in a ditch doth fall." Yet, like Sidney's devoted Astrophil, fools cannot ignore Love's call to "bend hitherward your wit" (Astrophil and Stella 19). On Valentine's Day especially that call is deafening.

The illustration (above) to writer David Henry Sterry's Salon piece about finding the love of his life and simultaneously his muse, got me thinking about the symbiosis between poetry (loosely defined) and the institutionalization of love. The image depicts what looks like a concrete poem, a piece of writing in the shape of its primary subject or theme, emerging from a typewriter. Because of its shape (that of a heart) the viewer cannot help but view the poem as a valentine. The tradition of sending these cards, poems, or epistles to one's sweetheart is as old as the holiday's association with romantic love, dating to the 15th century. The Renaissance cult of courtly love partly explains the origins of this practice. But why do we still turn, on this day, to puns and emblems to celebrate our romantic relationships?

Image Credit: missionbicycle.com

I'm not quite sure, but maybe if we look at another concrete poem of sorts we'll get closer to an answer. Payam Rajabi, the cyclist who sent this valentine to his long-distance girlfriend last year, created it by taking a heart-shaped path through the streets of San Francisco and tracking his route by GPS. The resulting screenshot is a spatial metaphor for his love. The map hyperbolically implies the magnitude of his affection (his love for her is a big as the city); the location evokes romance; and the shape of the route encourages a metonymic relationship between the place, San Francisco, and Rajabi's feelings (in other words, S.F. becomes a kind of shorthand for Rajabi and his deep affection for his girlfriend). Now what kind of boyfriend wouldn't aim to impart all of this on Valentine's Day with a single, poetic gesture? Maybe one who dislikes the idea of biking up Lombard Street.

SF hills aside, I think Rajabi's valentine illustrates that the holiday can serve as a sort of challenge for our wits, a poetic call to arms. For centuries, we have delighted in the challenge of transfering our profoundest feelings into the confines of a little poem or keepsake. As Donne writes of this magic trick, "we'll build in sonnets pretty rooms." Happy Valentine's Day!

Beyoncé's (Unflattering?) Halftime Show

Calliope — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 02:21:04 +0000

Image Credit: screenshot from Buzzfeed.com

Beyonce's publicist has created quite a media stir about photographs taken of the star's Super Bowl performance. On Tuesday this person apparently requested that Buzzfeed remove several "unflattering" images from the "33 Fiercest Moments from Beyonce's Halftime Show" gallery. The request was fruitless, considering the photos are still up; but it may have served a hidden purpose in igniting a flurry of posts, like Huffington's, that deny Beyonce has ever taken an unflattering photo. As the title suggests, Buzzfeed's controversial story adopts a playful, celebratory tone rather than a critical or parodic one. Its string of increasingly intense photos and enthusiastic captions create a mounting sense of the star's "ferocity," culminating in her mock deification ("Beysus knelt down to bless the audience") and popular coronation ("basically every moment was fierce...Because she's Queen B"). So why would anyone view this as bad publicity?

My hunch is that the publicist does not actually view the photos as damaging, but rather, understands the popular fascination with that which is deemed "unflattering." Labeling the actions or images of a celebrity as unflattering heightens the public's interest in them, and the resulting mediated exchange of criticism and support for the star is what's known as buzz. But in Beyonce's case, the unflattering label has been applied in an unusual way. This blog post explores why that is, and how the special deployment of this label asks us to readjust our idea of what's artificial and what's real.

What does the word unflattering mean, on a basic semantic level? Let's start with the "flattering" part. To flatter someone is to compliment them--stroke their ego--by stretching the truth. Things that flatter also involve a kind of deception. For instance, a flattering outfit or photograph hides what is unsightly, or by some measures, what is real. Thus, unflattering poses, pictures, and representations body forth the real without the manipulating or sterilizing it. (I realize that this definition is not as nuanced as it might be, but bear with me).

I use the phrase "body forth" intentionally, because tabloids and other celebrity spin machines typically associate the unflattering with certain kinds of bodily display. There is an entire industry devoted to documenting these "shocking" postures. When I Googled "unflattering celebrity photos" the Daily News piece "Meanest celebrity photos" came up along with millions of other hits (don't let the title fool you--the photo captions are merciless not sympathetic). Many of the 96 images in this gallery focus on bodily imperfection, contortion, malfunction, etc. Close-up shots direct the viewer's attention to the most grisly part of the subject's anotomy, as in the photo expose of Madonna's toenails below.

Image Credit: http://www.nydailynews.com

From the same treasure trove, here is one of Christy Turlington sporting a sweat stain that would make any ten-year-old snicker.

Image Credit: http://www.nydailynews.com

In both cases, the photographs reveal the real condition of the celebrity body, the body that exists beneath its manicured exterior. Questions of whether this kind of unflattering display is universally interesting, or whether it is ethical to publicize, are up for debate. But for our purposes it offers a point of comparison to the kind of labelling that occurred with Buzzfeed's Beyonce montage. The publicist's take-down request suggests that some of the published images--many of them capture the singer in the act of belting out a tune or grimacing theatrically to express feeling--do not show the singer in the best light, explicitly describing them as "unflattering." But, frankly, none of the Beyonce Super Bowl photos are remotely unflattering, at least when measured by the industry standards discussed above. Yes, we see (nearly) every nook and cranny of Beyonce's figure, but her nails are painted, her fishnets aren't torn, and her body appears smooth, muscular and hairless.

So, if the pictures exhibit no sign that Beyonce inhabits a real body--through bulges, rolls, discoloration, etc.--then what is there to raise an eyebrow at? The critique (ironically initiated by the star's own publicist) seems to be aimed at Beyonce's artistic performance instead of her personal appearance, the usual domain of the tabloid smear campaigns discussed earlier. This raises an interesting question. Can a performance, or a piece of art, be unflattering to the artist? It may be helpful to recall how we previously defined the word unflattering: something is unflattering if it fails to cover up undesirable aspects of reality. In the realms of musical or dramatic performance the term could therefore refer to the performer's fallability, or to signs that the dialogue is scripted and the production budget low. In Beyonce's case, though, it actually seems like the intensity rather than the quality of her performance is under scrutiny. The photo below is indicative of the ones singled out by the publicist's email.

Image Credit: screenshot from Buzzfeed.com

Calling photos like this unflattering--photos that reveal a performer's personality, feeling, effort, or unpredictability--suggests that there is no place in popular entertainment for real self-expression. Only highly choreographed, controlled movements can be flattering and feelings must be pantomimed, not truly felt. They certainly can't be grunted.

Blankets, Shields, and Fences: The NRA's Euphemisms for Guns

Calliope — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:58:01 +0000

Source: http://youtu.be/8hPrjMQlb6Y

There were several emotional speeches broadcast today from the Senate hearing on the problem of gun violence. Former Representative and shooting victim Gabrielle Giffords opened the session with a brief but urgent call to action, citing the deaths of children as reasons to "be bold." Later the committee heard gun activist Gayle Trotter's testimony which raised concerns for women, especially single mothers, who rely on guns to protect themselves and their families. The National Rifle Association's chief Wayne LaPierre also summoned pathos to his cause. LaPierre pointed to the NRA's model school shield program, an initiative to increase security in public schools as a way to stop tragedies like the horrific school shooting that occured in Newtown, Connecticut last month.

To advocate for placing armed guards in more schools LaPierre employed a peculiar, and what I find to be an alarming, figure of speech. Punning on the term "security blanket" he proposed, "It’s time to throw an immediate blanket of security around our children" (see clip above).

Image Credit: the365plan.blogspot.com

This is the traditional notion of a security blanket. Like so many children, the Peanuts character Linus derives a sense of comfort and safety from his trusted blanket and he's rarely seen without it. Given that the "blankey" is commonly associated with dependency, trust, and familiarity, LaPierre's metaphor seems to imply that kids (and presumably their parents) need and want the presence of armed guards on their school campuses, and that guards' presence would be comforting. Should we be troubled by this vision of childhood? Clutching a favorite piece of fleece and hopefully casting it aside before one gets too old seems harmless enough. But growing up inured to the sight of guns, and possibly forming an attachment to them, might not be as innocuous. Perhaps kids won't be able to shake the "blanket of security" and will carry it with them into adulthood, surrounding themselves with weapons because they have always equated them with safety and confidence. The idea of an adult security blanket may sound unhealthy to some readers, but it likely does not to the head of the NRA.

This "blanket of security" concept fascinated me so much that I decided to look for similar rhetoric in other statements by LaPierre. Recently in America's 1st Freedom, a magazine published by the NRA for its members, LaPierre portrays guns and gun ownership as a matter of "survival" in a world beset by "Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals." LaPierre contends that, in the absence of a "secure border fence," guns and the law abiding citizens who carry them are a crucial line of defense against the "terrorists" and "Latin American drug gangs" who have invaded the southwest. Not only are we told that gun culture can act as a barrier to these alien threats, but also that the NRA is an "indispensable shield against the destruction of our nation’s Second Amendment rights." Thus, the phrase "blanket of security" fits in with a family of terms that the NRA uses to describe guns, gun supporters and the "legal" use of firearms. Like a fence or a shield, a blanket is both passive and protective. All are strictly technologies of defense.

Image: www.nrapublications.org

In the same America's 1st Freedom piece LaPierre warns readers about an imminent "tsunami of gun control," a "flood of new anti-gun federal regulations," and a "coming seige" of opposition directed at the 2nd amendment. The deliberate reversal of terms is hard to miss. LaPierre styles the threat of gun reform--restrictions on guns sales and/or the tightening of gun laws--as active and chaotically destructive forces. In contrast, guns and gun owners are the beseiged. Instead of actively shaping or harming society, gun culture is a passive bulwark against attacks on our constitutional rights.

Is that stretching the truth? I'll leave it to readers and the Senate Judiciary Committee to decide.

The Sacred City at The Blanton: Competing Ethics of Mandalas and Museums

Calliope — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:22:12 +0000

Image Credit: http://hyperallergic.tumblr.com

About a week and a half ago I made a spur of the moment trip to The Blanton Museum of Art for the closing ceremony of "Into the Sacred City," a recent exhibit on Tibetan religious art. The day's program included the erasure of a five-foot sand mandala which a group of Buddhist monks had spent five days creating in the museum's main atrium. For those of you who aren't familiar with this colorful ritual practice, sand mandalas are intricate circular designs which can represent, variously, the universe, the interworkings of the mind, or even the palacial dwellings of deities. In Tibetan practice, when the pattern is complete the sands are swept together and dispersed in a stream or river. The monks who created the mandala at The Blanton (above) followed this ancient tradition, blurring the completed design with a few strokes of a brush before hundreds of mesmerized spectators (see image below). Though I braved the long lines and made it into the exhibit, I actually did not get to witness the destruction of the mandala. My view was blocked by the massive crowd that turned out for the occasion. But what I could see, and consequently what I began to think about, was the setting of this creative act, or its context. I began to wonder about the place of religious practice in secular institutions and how the ethos of the space affects the gravity of the ritual. I also reflected on the irony of staging the impermanence of art, through its construction and subsequent deconstruction, in the very church of preservation: the museum.

Image Credit: Lindsay Hutchens, 2013

My first thought--about the relation between the sacred "text" and the premise of an art museum, with its curatorial aims and historicizing approach--might as easily have occured to me in scores of other art exhibits around the world, that is, in any collection that contains "functional" religious art, like altarpieces or icons. The reframing of religious iconography and/or ritual practice as the object(s) of public curiosity, begs the question: can the manner of display and the ethics of the audience desacralize such works of art? Some will say this is a meaningless question in the first place because, after all, who decides which pieces of art are "sacred," and when and how they become more or less sacred. But it's an interesting question nonetheless because I think it highlights--through the extreme example of religious artwork--the distance that always exists between the values of the maker and consumer of any artwork. No creative person can be sure that their artwork will record their values, mystical experience, etc. and translate them perfectly to an audience whose appreciation for art may be simply aesthetic or intellectual.

My second thought--about the disjunction between an artistic process that culminates in destroying something beautiful and the venue in which it took place (an art museum)--is something I'm still puzzling about. I think what heightened the irony of this event and made it almost humorous was that almost every adult surrounding the mandala had photographed it at least once, if not multiple times, before it was whisked away. To me, the museum-goers' impulse to preserve what they saw in lasting visual form, so that they could return to it, inspect it, perhaps even feel as though they possessed it, seemed utterly to conflict with the monks' calm detachment from their painstaking creation. The rest of the "Sacred City" exhibit seemed to resist the transitory nature of the mandala exercise as well. For instance, there were photographs of a number of mandalas, created and presumably destroyed decades ago, hanging up just steps away from the live exhibit. Strange as it was, ultimately the tension between the monks' secular audience, who sought to rescue or preserve the mandala, and the spiritualists, who valued the loss of the mandala itself, made for a fascinating exhibit and event.

Presenting the Family: A Holiday Ritual

Calliope — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 17:31:45 +0000

Image Credit: minted.com

Choosing a holiday card is apparently a big deal. I was not aware of this until my sister (married with two children) called me in distress over designing her card. As we talked and I pressed her to explain how this could possibly be stressful, I learned that the tradition of sending out greeting cards around the holidays isn't just about spreading good cheer. The rise of the photocard has made holiday salutations into an important opportunity for families to make a positive visual impression on friends and relatives. This surprised me a little because I had naively assumed the intent was to express one's hot-cocoa-induced feelings for the cards' recipients. But considering that media today is increasingly social, targeted, and customizable, the practice of creating a visual brand for one's family and sharing it with others should come as no surprise at all.

Image Credit: minted.com

What's interesting about the way this tradition has evolved is its correspondence to an emphasis on carefully mediated photography in popular social media (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.). The photocard puts the family portrait front-and-center, replacing seasonal or religious iconography with family faces; and the photos that are included are often professionally taken, or at the very least posed, cropped, edited, and thoughtfully arranged. In my sister's circle of thirty-something friends, it's much more common to exchange customized photocards than store-bought cards with a candid snapshot thrown inside. Her friends use custom stationary sites like minted.com and tinyprints.com to create their distinct family look with carefully chosen photos and a prominent byline (see "The Jones Family 2012," and "The Laurants" above). Affixing the family name to a controlled, manufactured image of its members gives the card a corporate feel; the examples above could easily be ads for clothing stores (just replace "The Laurants" with Eddie Bauer or J. Crew).

These cards aren't very subtle about their aims. Their purpose is to construct a familial identity just as Facebook pages and online bios construct identities for individuals. The fact that they perform an authorized, identity-building function for families--groups as opposed to individuals--makes them fascinating and unique social objects. As I looked through pages of sample cards on the aforementioned sites, I tried to think of other widely-observed rituals or spaces in which families present carefully crafted images of themselves. Aside from engagement photos, and possibly birth announcements, which these photocards clearly draw upon, I could not think of many other occasions for publicly presenting a pre-fab image of the nuclear family. And then I remembered those stick figure families.

Image Credit: gorestruly.com

You know, the pictographic sticker-inventories of families displayed on the back of cars (see above). At first these bare representations might strike you as fundamentally different than the holiday photocards, which include a much more intimate portrait of the family. But I suspect that the decision to put these stickers on the back of one's car is related to the basic impulse behind the photocard: to advertise that you have a family, indicate its size, show that it is happy and thriving, and embrace group identity over individuality.

Image Credit: minted.com

Holiday cards that double as yearly newsletters seem to combine intimate presentations of the family with statements about their size, uniformity, group behavior. In the past, families might have sat down together during the holidays to write a long, usually humorous missive about what they experienced or accomplished that year. Now, sites like Minted encourage us to create and share infographics that measure our family's growth in stats and figures.

And now I will try my hardest not to leave you with an anti-commercialist, Grinch-like message, nor a moralizing one (even though these are two of my favorite postures). I will admit that after spending time on the virtual Hallmark aisle of our day, I can understand where my sister is coming from. Projecting an image of one's family is a delicate affair, and not an easy thing to opt out of. Almost any card, whether it's store-bought, handmade, digital, or photographic, will say something about how you want your family's values, traditions, class and lifestyle to be perceived. So choose wisely, and have a wonderful holiday season.

Bel Geddes, Brasilia, and Cities from the Air

Calliope — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 17:17:25 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Norman Bel Geddes, Airliner #4 rendering, ca. 1929-1932

Touring the Harry Ransom Center's Norman Bel Geddes exhibit a few weeks ago, my fellow viz. staffers and I were struck by how many of the designer's projects never made it past the drawing board. Bel Geddes' sketches of giant, amphibious aircrafts (see "Airliner #4" above) are prime examples of the far-fetched schemes his studio was hatching in the 30s alongside commercially viable designs, like this handsome pair of seltzer bottles featured in an earlier post. But, as other viz. contributers this week have remarked, articulating what is not and will never be seems like an inevitable part of a theorizing and designing the future. It certainly makes strolling through the Ransom Center's "I Have Seen the Future" exhibit feel like a trip into a delightful, hybrid world of fiction and history.

Geddes' plans for airborne commercial and recreational spaces (the 451 passengers aboard the flying machine, above, would have access to a gymnasium and a full orchestra) interest me because they present a counterpoint to the "auto-centric America" with which Geddes' work is usually associated. It's likely that Geddes' designs influenced both American aviation and automotive systems, but for an untrained industrial designer like Geddes, the first of these frontiers must have seemed significantly more difficult to modernize, if only from an engineering standpoint. The challenge of hoisting into the air a full spectrum of modern amenities makes Geddes' airplanes look almost cartoonish. Yet, when we recall that the horizon of space travel was not so far off, Geddes' airliners look less dream-like than before.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (with tail fin), ca. 1933

Geddes' concepts for land vehicles, even, borrow design elements from the skies. Like a plane, this motor car is both winged and streamlined so as to travel swiftly down the chute-like highways that Geddes envisioned for cities of the future.

Moreover, several of Geddes' larger projects play with ideas of suspension and aerial perspective. The people entering the General Motors building (pictured below), which Geddes helped to design for the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, look as though they're levitating as they stream into the exhibit on a swirly staircase. The shape of the ramp reflects the free-flowing highway system that Geddes' Futurama exhibit proposed as a solution for urban congestion. (The Futurama exhibit was housed by the GM building, below.) It also mirrors the building's uppermost edge, the slope of which resembles the path of an airplane at lift off. The structure clearly employs the architectural metophor of slope to signify scientific progress, economic growth, and/or social mobility for commercial and nationalistic purposes.

Image Credit: thefrailestthing.com

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Bel Geddes' famed Futurama installation, the focal point of GM's "Highways and Horizons" World's Fair pavilion, required a mobile, aerial perspective to be fully absorbed by its spectators. Visitors were conveyed around the model on a track positioned above the miniature city. Because the onlookers studied the cityscape from the perspective of a plane, during a time when private flights were uncommon--and commercial aviation nonexistent--Geddes' exhibit must have been doubly displacing for its viewers. Glimpsing at an urban future that prized efficiency, utility, and mobility surely presented them with a unique experience. But apart from that, the shifting aerial vantage point that the ride simulated must have seemed marvelous and novel in itself, since it is unlikely that many of Futurama's spectators had ever hovered over any city--past, present, or future.

General Motors, Futurama Spectators, ca. 1939

Image Credit: Screenshot of Google Maps

I now want to hover over another modernist city--a real one that happens to be the capital of Brazil. In 1956, when the Brazilian President commissioned Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer to build Brasília, the nation's new capital seat, the architects had already collaborated on another definitive modernist project: the award-winning Brazilian pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. (As you will recall, this particular World's Fair was also the site of Bel Geddes' Futurama exhibit.) Beyond this instance of proximity between the designers' work, there are additional interesting parallels between Bel Geddes' vision and the mature designs of the Brazilian duo. The Brasília project, for instance, literalizes Bel Geddes' bird's-eye conception of the modern city by organizing the city's roads and structures in the shape of a plane (see the Google Maps image above). A decade-and-a-half after Bel Geddes used aerial perspective to show that cities could be planned and networked with well-designed infrastructure, Costa and Niemeyer memorialized the airplane--a symbol of transcendent viewpoint (?)--within the structure of a modern metropolis.

When you visit the "I Have Seen the Future" exhibit at the Ransom Center, as I hope you will, do not despair that the miniature buildings of the Futurama exhibit remained forever in the realm of fantasy, like the buildings of present-day Legoland. Brasília is a very real place that, at ground level, shares Bel Geddes' modernist aesthetics, and from the sky, pays tribute to a globalized present that indeed has been shaped by aviation.

Image Credit: uccla.net

The viewpoints expressed in this blog post are strictly those of viz., and do not in any way represent the opinions of The Harry Ransom Center.

Colorful Geographies of Beliefs

Calliope — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 19:31:22 +0000

Image Credit: MIT Technology Review

This electoral map, created by Princeton mathematician Robert J. Vanderbei, uses a spectrum of colors between blue and red to represent the ratio per county of Democrat to Republican votes. The height of the verticals indicate the number of votes in each county. Vanderbei's representation of the U.S. votes by region accounts for nuances in the data that other red-and-blue-state maps miss: the political dividedness of certain counties, the intensity of partisanship in others, and centers of strong voter turn out. From a visual standpoint, the map is eye-catching because it is purple. Purple is not a color usually associated with political belief. But other data crunchers, looking to complicate our picture of national voting trends, have unveiled maps this year with a similar palette. See my fellow viz. contributer Chris Ortiz y Prentice's post for an electoral map that also reveals (through pointillism instead of 3-dimensional modelling) the nation's purplish complexion.

It might be mere coincidence that Chris and I both decided to write about visualizing ideological regionalism; but it's possible that our posts register an increasing need to redraw and redefine assumptions about voter demographics. That said, I'll leave the actual work of redefinition up to political analysts and turn to the far more obscure aims of this entry: to discuss the rhetorical role of color in images that chart belief systems and controversial policies.

The distribution of color in Vanderbei's map implies that political allegiances are not as ubiquitous in some regions--like the South and Midwest--as one might suspect. It even gives the impression (which may be misguided) that Americans are politically moderate, since variegation in color usually expresses in-betweeness instead of extremes. But let's talk about the map's predominant hue for a moment. Purple is not a color that Republicans, Democrats, or Greens, for that matter, would claim, probably because it doesn't have any patriotic or environmental associations. The main things that come to my mind when I think of purple are grape juice, Lisa Frank, and Skittles. I also have the unreasonable expectation that anyone who is wearing a purple shirt should be friendly and easy to approach. I'm pretty sure that everyone has their own set of responses to this and other colors--some responses may be arbitrary or psychological, and some culturally-determined. And yet we rely on colors to codify politically important groups and ideologies. The fact that colors have both a particular and universal significance for most people is what makes assigning them to maps like Vanderbei's a rhetorically interesting (and potentially dicey) practice.

Image Credit: The Pew Forum

I looked at some graphics by the Pew Research Center for its project on Religion and Public Life to see which colors are presently being applied to other sensitive attitudes and beliefs. The creators of the chart above, which explains current state policies on gay marriage, chose an earthy palette of green, yellow, tan and white to represent the four main legal positions: states that allow it, states with constitutional bans, states with statutory bans, and those with no legal stance. It's conceivable why green was chosen to mark the states that have or will shortly legalize gay marriage. Green is typically the color of environmentally-friendly and/or socially-conscious causes and gay rights is an issue that fits with this progressive platform. It's interesting that the none of the other colors are linked to political parties, though. The color used to denote the most restrictive of the four positions (states with constitutional bans on gay marriage) is a sallow yellow shade. Conscious color choice? You decide.

The think tank's news story about the rising number of Americans who do not identify with any religion is striking for its lack of color. The article includes illustrations and graphs (one depicts the ratio of religious to non-religious individuals in the U.S. with a map-shaped group of gray and black figures) but they are all monochromatic and colorless. Does the term that the editors use to refer to this growing group--the 'nones'--necessitate such a color scheme? I wonder if non-religious people identify with the possible valences of this term and the corresponding color coding (anonymity, absence, indefiniteness)?

Image Credit: The Pew Forum

Lastly, we have one of the only sources I found floating around on the Internet that specifies which Christian denomination has the leading number of adherents in each U.S. county. (The map was updated in 2010, but I couldn't access it for free online). I'm taken by this map because of the way it differs from the one at the beginning of the blog post. The people who built this visualization opted to portray the adherents of each religion as unified and undifferentiated by using flat colors. And the data they collected indicates that most churches hold sway in contained areas of the map--the Baptists in the South, Lutherans in the midwest, and Mormons in and surrounding Utah. Interestingly, the map-makers assigned the two most dominant church bodies, the Baptist and Catholic religions, colors that correspond to the main U.S. political parties. It's worth reflecting whether one can look at a map like this without seeing the color-coded territories as translating to votes for liberal and conservative candidates.

Image Credit: valpo.edu

The Pedagogical and Aesthetic Possibilities of Crowdsourced Films

Calliope — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:26:13 +0000

Image Credit: RoseVallentine

I teach a class about the new rhetoric of internet commerce. I have my students write a standard rhetorical analysis paper around the middle of the term, and for their primary texts I ask them to use the digital marketing materials of dotcoms. Of all the paper genres I assign (expository, persuasive, etc.) rhetorical analysis is generally my favorite. I prefer these papers because I'm a literary critic, and rhetorical analyses are essentially close readings that use a standard rhetorical methodology. But there's another reason I especially enjoyed reading my students' analysis papers this semester: they introduced me to several fantastic websites that I didn't know about before. I feel compelled to share one of these sites with viz. readers because of its novel interventions in visual culture. (And I want to thank my student, who I will refrain from naming, for the great find!). The company is called hitRECord, an open, online platform for collaborative filmmaking and other artistic expression.

The novelty of the business concept is that it enables creative individuals to combine their talents through a transparent, user-controlled process, instead of having to adapt their ideas, writing, acting, etc. to the demands of a traditional production company. If users work on a project together and it turns a profit, half of the proceeds go to hitREcord and half are paid to people on the team. It may come as a surprise that the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, famous for his roles in mainstream features like Ten Things I Hate About You, is the man behind this decidedly un-Hollywood-like venture. But Gordon-Levitt is not just the site's celebrity mascot (despite what appears to be an ironic appeal to his celebrity status on the website's main page).

Image Credit: Screenshot of hitrecord.org

The founder is an active participant on the website's discussion boards, a guest performer in some of the short films, and the bubbly personality of HitRECord's Youtube channel, where the company broadcasts its massive casting calls and solicits all kinds of original, user-generated material.

Video Credit: Youtube video by hitrecord.org

After watching a few of hitRECord's video prompts, like the one entitled "RE: Flickering Lights" (above), I was struck by their pedagogical aims and procedures. The initial project that Gordon-Levitt highlights in this video--a compilation of poetry, original music, and a thematic series of shots--is analogous to the first draft of a student project. Gordon-Levitt talks about this mashup as if he is a teacher urging his students to develop their ideas. "While I really like his edit and I think it's really good, I think that we can take it a step further," he says. Later on in the clip, after he sets the parameters for revising and amplifying the flickering light piece, Gordon-Levitt brings in a cinematographer to give viewers a short tutorial on how to capture high quality footage of flickering lights. The instructional aspect of these videos reminds me of the trend in education across subject areas torward MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and video instruction of all kinds. It also occured to me as I was watching that assignment prompts of any nature, though especially for creative projects, could be made way more engaging (and comprehensible?) if they were delivered in video form. It might also be a good idea to approach them as if they were a casting call, or call for submissions.

Image Credit: Youtube video by hitrecord.org

My final comments are in reference to a video called "Iterations" (above), which was created by several hitRECord collaborators and released days ago with support from Levi's. The caption posted with the film on Youtube explains that "ITERATIONS tells the coming of age story of a girl's sometimes difficult and sometimes reluctant path to adulthood." But some of the song lyrics--"I'm an experiment, each trial is a test, constant recalibration. I am recycled cells, I learn to like myself...all disjointed, my file corrupted"--suggest that the story may also be about the process of assembling a digital art project, and the challenge/futility/thrill of making an artistic unity from multiple "disjointed" standpoints. I wonder if the handmade, stitched look of the images in this film, along with the fact that many of the hitRECord's film projects involve animation, may be attributed to the crowdsourced origin of their production. Do crowdsourced films have different aesthetic and generic features than their traditional counterparts? Is one of the main differences that the crowdsourced kind cultivate or exhibit a patchworked sensibility? I'm not sure, but I'm interested to see what new frontiers the artists at hiRECord discover together.

For the Love of SF

Calliope — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 18:41:58 +0000

Image Credit: Facebook.com

About half of my Facebook friends live in the SF Bay Area, and out of everyone they are by far the most active posters. They're constantly touting political views, promoting their startups, recommending good reads, and most of all reminding everyone through pictures and status updates that they live in the "best" city in the country (Businessweek made it official with their city rankings for 2012). As a former resident of SF who once drank the Kool-Aid, it's hard not to sound bitter and hypocritical about the locals' enthusiasm. Who knows, maybe instead of Kool-aid, now I'm just sucking on sour grapes. Let me be clear: there's no reason why San Franciscans shouldn't love there city. It is indisputably one of the most beautiful urban centers in the country. Pastel-colored buildings decorate its famous hills, which look out over the Pacific ocean and the wrap-around bay. And it boasts world-class universities, progressive politics, and vibrant international communities, all of which attract a distinctly intellectual, liberal, and enterprising kind of person. Like I said, it makes perfect sense that SF residents love their city, and that they would want to share this pride through social media. Most of the time I’m grateful for their posts because they offer me a way to vicariously experience the beautiful and eclectic place where I came of age. But the pictures also consistently make me laugh, and I confess they increasingly make me groan. This post will explore why that is.

People who live in SF--and I'm not talking about newcomers--love to take pictures of the city's landmarks and breathtaking overlooks, and share them on Facebook. I understand the impulse to snap a photo of a lovely view; but to constantly share pictures of famous places as if no one had ever seen them before, raises some questions. How many longtime Manhattanites share personal photographs of the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty? I'd wager relatively few. Yet, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marina, Coit Tower and the Ferry Building are all over my Facebook and Instagram feeds. None of my friends are particularly good photographers, either, so it's unclear why their pictures of these places would offer viewers a novel experience of them.

Image Credit: Facebook.com

But I'm coming at this from the wrong angle. These photos aren't being posted to indulge the viewer's sense of curiosity about San Francisco. They're being used as evidence for ethical appeals about the person who is posting them, evidence that these treasures are "in my backyard, and part of my everyday life"--proof that "I chose and can afford to live in the most celebrated city in America." The Facebook photos are also evidence of the person's immediate location, which has become a social commodity and a valuable asset to companies like Foursquare that trade in "check-ins." The picture above with its unassumingly assuming caption, "Golden Gate from the St. Francis yacht club," serves as evidence that the photographer was at a yacht club, whose proximity to the Golden Gate Bridge implies that it is an especially exclusive one.

Image Credit: Facebook.com

The caption for this snapshot of the Ferry Building and the distant East Bay uses an intentionally transparent form of understatement. The view from this Facebook user's office is anything but shabby, and the picture establishes that the photographer works high up in a building that must have an extraordinarily high rent.

Image Credit: Facebook.com

This user hits us with a 1-2 punch of SF-related imagery. Her profile picture features the iconic Golden Gate Bridge while the Ferry Building clock tower looms in the background. Her choice to surround herself, virtually, in loco-specific images indicates that her joyous hair-toss in the photograph expresses her feelings about the city.

Image Credit: Facebook.com

Here we have another enthusiast--let's call her the SF hugger--whose wide grin, we are led to conclude, is related to the cityscape behind her, which she gestures at with outspread arms. These kind of photos make me laugh and sigh irritatedly (if you allow that those two respitory events can happen at once). They attempt to suggest something about a person's life in a city--that it is free and joyful?--beyond the moment in which the photograph was taken. But this message is undercut by the incredibly staged and exaggerated aspect of the figure's pose.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is: Citizens of SF, we know you live in a beautiful city. It has been well-documented by thousands of instagramming yuppies before you. Your ethos is not enhanced by standing (or gesticulating wildly) in front of the city, whose skyline you have transformed into a status symbol, and the danger of posting photos like these is that your friends will rhetorically analyze you.

Halloween, People Watching, and Fashion

Calliope — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 15:49:04 +0000

Image Credit: Halloweenorwilliamsburg.com

Halloween season put me in mind of the hipster-bashing tumblr Halloween or Williamsburg that emerged around this time last year. The microblog features crowd-sourced photos of people in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, whose over-the-top fashion choices cause daily confusion about whether or not it is Halloween. The website’s wittily-captioned parade of fools is relentlessly funny, though it inevitably delivers a slightly skewed version of reality. (I've never been to Williamsburg, but I imagine not every resident reaches for the costume box when they get dressed every morning.) But that’s partly why the site offers such a satisfying experience. Scrolling through its photo logs is like going people watching and seeing only the “gems.” It’s like a walk down Telegraph Avenue sans the drab-looking Cal students.

Image Credit: Halloweenorwilliamsburg.com

But it’s not just the concentration of outrageous that gets people to visit this and similar shrines to public display. As the blog title suggests, the real ambiguity in the photographs between what is intended for holiday and what passes as everyday, or what is exceptional and what is ordinary, is the main fascination. In fact, the conflation of spectacle with everyday existence (lifestyle) is what makes many counter cultures seem so curious—even laughable—to the mainstream.

It strikes me that there’s an intermediate position between introducing pirate garb into one’s fall wardrobe and keeping costume-y aesthetics safely at bay (in the haunted house, on their designated day). Fashion critics, for instance, celebrate flamboyant sartorial expression within shifting but recognized limits of decorum. To the fashion forward, context is one such limiting factor: the Tudor-inspired ruff that looked chic on the runway probably won’t go over so well at the office happy hour. The design of one's clothing and coherence of one's ensemble are important considerations as well. But even with these strictures, there are plenty of everyday people, including and especially hipsters, who succeed at smuggling a little bit of Halloween into their daily lives through the guise of “style.”

Thanks to a new Internet sensation called Styleblaster, you may spot these folks and approve their outfits in real time. The makers of the site installed a webcam next to a busy Williamsburg subway stop that snaps a picture every time someone walks by. So now we have another blog to ensure that the ordinary denizens of Williamsburg will be subjected to fashion critique along with the neighborhood’s perennial trick-or-treat-ers.

Image Credit: Screenshot from styleblaster.net

The only novel (and potentially controversial) aspect of this study in street style is that the method is automated and non-consensual. Most of the passersbys don’t know they’re on camera, and it’s possible that some of them would object to having photographic evidence of their appearance and whereabouts published in such a public forum.

Image Credit: Screenshot from styleblaster.net

It’s interesting to consider Styleblaster alongside its counterpart, Halloween or Williamsburg, because each site employs candid photography to perpetuate different arguments about an overlapping group of subjects. The continuous flow of photographs on the style-watching site softens the sting of a "bad review" by piling more and more "random" photos on top of it. (The website doesn’t have a commenting function yet, but a lack of top hats—Styleblaster’s version of a thumbs up—can indicate that an outfit is a flop). On the other hand, Halloween or Williamsburg’s contributors’ point their cameras and derision squarely at select group of flagrantly self-advertising weirdos. So, one website deals gently with Williamsburg’s fashion offenders, whereas the other’s sole purpose is to render them ridiculous.

Image Credit: Screenshot from styleblaster.net

The promise of achieving fame or infamy on either site may actually exert pressure on the community to turn up the style dial. For those who want to be noticed on—or at least well received by—the fashion-oriented Styleblaster, this may mean dressing to meet the public’s expectations for Williamsburgian eccentricity. For the exhibitionists on Halloween or Williamburg, it’s like they made it onto the Who’s Who of hipsterdom. I can’t imagine that the attention is anything but encouraging for them. This is all to say that Halloween is nearly here, and in places like Williamsburg it is surely here to stay.

Visualizing Missed Connections

Calliope — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:46:14 +0000

Image Credit: Sophie Blackall via Flavorwire.com

Some "missed connections" ads have a life beyond Craigslist. Though only a small fraction may lead to actual rendezvous, dozens have found their way into the imagination of book illustrator Sophie Blackall, who published a collection of watercolor interpretations of these ads called Missed Connections: Love, Lost and Found (2011). Blackall's paintings imaginatively visualize the encounters that inspire people to write these heartfelt epistles on missed connection pages (the Internet's version of the proverbial bathroom wall). Her designs have been called "heartbreaking" and "comical" , "wonderful" and "whimsical" , and her book was featured on Oprah's website--a testament to its popular appeal. Presumably, Blackall's illustrations made a splash because they incorporate a delightful mix of the real and the ideal, yoking artifacts of modern life to images of pure fantasy in a style reminiscent of Blackall's artwork for children.

Image Credit: Sophie Blackall via Flavorwire.com

Some would say they infuse the mundane with the magic of a quest romance. Many of her pieces play with elements of the supernatural (don't the bear people above look like followers of Circe or Spenser's Acrasia?); others include idealized portraits of a pursued hero or heroine (see Long Curly Brown Hair above); and sometimes they picture the hapless pursuer himself (see the man with a yellow scarf, below).

But more than simply evoking hallmarks of the romance tradition, Blackall's illustrations tap into anxieties about seeing the object of one's love without knowing or feeling it, and vice versa (knowing without seeing). This disjunction between vision and knowledge is essential to the basic missed connection storyline: a man catches a tantalizing glimpse of a beautiful stranger, and is haunted by the fact that she will never know how he feels. "I found you stunningly beautiful but you'll probably never know," Long Curly Brown Hair's admirer writes.

Image Credit: Sophie Blackall via Flavorwire.com

This focus on the disconnect between individuals' visual impression of each other and their real intimacy may also be seen as commenting on actual romantic relationships, not just those that are fantasized about on the missed connections page. More specifically, Blackall's pictures seem to engage with relationships that are distancing, or those that lack emotional "glue." It seems significant that the individuals in each of the couples above are obstructed from seeing or communicating with eachother (one pair is obstructed by a bear's head, the other by the fact that the figures are both sleeping). It's possible to read these obstructions as figuring different social and psychological phenomena that are coming between us.

Interestingly, vision, looking, and watching are some of the main faculties we use in our online love lives. Social-networking tools like Facebook have made it increasingly easy to see others without being seen (think of the last time you discreetly [pre]viewed a love interest online). This tendency to monitor or "stalk" others online has arguably created barriers to making real-life connections. Knowing that almost everyone is on Facebook, for instance, may reduce our incentive to be memorable or bold in person (because we know we can look them up later) or it may cause us to form negative preconceptions about people before we ever speak to them. Blackall's pictures seem to be in dialogue with these kinds of issues.

I will now take this blog post in an unexpected, if not improbable, direction: to the poetry and illustrations William Blake. Few people would associate Blackall's soft, velvety paintings with Blake's muscular engravings. Yet, I want to suggest that Blackall's work--though disimilar to Blake in its technique--sometimes exhibits a Blakean perspective on vision and love. The basis for this claim may be discerned in a few plates of Blake's 1793 poem "Visions of the Daughters of Albion." The poem undertakes the gigantic task of exposing the human toll of empire, and the perversity of its social institutions. On another level, though, it is simply about the emotional distance between unseeing lovers.

Image Credit: Copy O, c. 1818 (British Museum), William Blake Archive

The poem's epigraph, "The Eye sees more than the Heart knows," can be read as expressing the dilemma of Blackall's modern romantic: s/he is a socially-networked spectator of partners; but she is emotionally isolated, with a heart that doesn't know them.

Image Credit: Copy O, c. 1818 (British Museum), William Blake Archive

In the plate above, Oothoon and Bromion on the left seem to touch, but only through their mutual chains. They gaze in opposite directions while Theotormon, the third member of this connected but disconnected love triangle, stubbornly gazes navel-ward. The three figures crouch on the threshold of vision with no hope of ever gaining it (a sun-eyeball hangs tauntingly over the water in the background). Blackall's yellow skarf boy (above) who writes that he "wanted to apologize for [his] repeated lack of consciousness onto [the sleeping girl's] shoulder" could, I think, belong to this unconscious group. His message will never reach the girl, and she never knew he admired her in the first place. The Long Curly Brown Hair girl, too, has a place on Blake's sandbank. Her identity (and her hair) is trapped like the tragic group in a threshold of vision--trapped between two eye-like windows and the blink of her admirer's eyelids. He writes, "I watched as you stepped between closing doors and disappeared." The admirer, the artist, and we (the painting's viewers) can only know the Long Curly Brown Hair girl as an object of sight, and as Blake would warn us, this vision of love is far too narrow.

Image Credit: Copy P, c. 1818 (Fitzwilliam Museum), William Blake Archive

The Physiognomy of Presidential Debate

Calliope — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 03:04:47 +0000

Image credit: Art Resource, N.Y.

I, too, have caught the debate season fever. I humbly submit to you another viz. post on the Romney-Obama debate from last week. I couldn't help sharing the strange firing of synapses that led me from Colbert's recap of the October 3rd debate to the head pieces of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. Follow along, if you dare!

The day after the debate Stephen Colbert reminded us that however inconsistent some of the candidates' remarks might have seemed, in the end, "the arguments hardly mattered." "What counts," squealed the master of truthiness, "is body language!" He then summoned to the screen the testimony of a few Fox News pundits, who dutifully analyzed the predominant facial expression of one or both candidates as part of the ethos they projected at the event. Their attention to countenance (my use of the archaism is deliberate) was pure provocation to the rubber-faced Colbert. He parodied the practice of ascribing political (and moral?) importance to small facial contortions in a series of camera shots in which he adopted various key "looks." First Colbert tried on Romney's confident half-smile, which conservative wonk Brit Hume, in his post debate commentary, was careful to distinguish from a "smirk."

Image credit: Screenshot of Hulu.com video player

After affirming that "choosing the leader of the free world is clearly all about how it looks" and playing a video mash up of the candidates' facial expressions during the debate (with the sound muted) Colbert tried his luck with Hume's distinctive maw.

Image credit: Screenshot of Hulu.com video player

Todd Battistelli has already alerted us to the rhetorical contrivance of identifying a politician with one of their funny faces. Thus I'll refrain from closely examining Colbert's posturing as various political personalities, which I think takes aim at the questionable brand of photo-journalism Todd describes in his post. But it also points up a more serious and problematic issue in mainstream news media, that is, a tendency to suggest an identification of personal character with an individual's stage demeanor, or in this case, with their facial expression. This mode of analysis, which relates uncomfortably to the rhetorical analysis of ethos we teach students, assigns real significance to body language, legitimizes comparisons between individuals based on the perceived dominance or submissiveness of their gate, and as Colbert points out, sometimes trumps analysis of the spoken word. One really has to wonder who would have come out on top of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates had they occurred in our present environment of “election by visual impression.” Honest Abe, with his weathered, homely appearance and tattered ill-fitting coats, might not have faired so well despite his soaring oratory.

Viewers of the debate were fascinated by the reticence of Obama to engage Romney forcefully, as evidenced by his hanging head, his reluctant posture, and his impatient and agitated facial expressions. Like watching a boxer slumping and ducking from his opponent in the ring, the lack of perceived aggression on Obama’s part cost him points on the scorecards of the judges. On the other hand, "Alpha Mitt," as Colbert dubbed him, had the bearing of a confident champion. And how was this impression conveyed? Less through the employment of superior logic or mastery of the facts, but more through the facile usage of expression, posture, purposeful eye focus, lack of blinking, and the like. A well-coached, well-constructed appearance had won out over the supposed charisma and intelligence of Obama--highly reminiscent of the Kennedy-Nixon Debates of 1960, where a tanned and confident John F. Kennedy’s healthful and vigorous appearance on TV, as Laura Thain notes, was often cited as a reason for the turning of the tide in that election.

All of this brings us to the subject of physiognomy—the practice of judging character and mental qualities or attributes by observing facial and bodily features. To understand the mindset of the physiognomist one might do worse than to study the artistic renderings of the eighteenth-century German sculptor (and borderline madman) Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. Messerschmidt became a sort of folk hero of the proponents of physiognomy by virtue of his famous collection of sculpted, life-size “character heads,” an exhaustive exploration 69 human expressions rendered in alabaster. His contemporary physiognomists, such as Johann Caspar Lavater, felt that the intentions and inner character of an individual could be faithfully revealed through the informed reading of his facial expression.

Image credit: Screenshot of image by The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008

So, what would Lavater and Messerschmidt have made of the Romney-Obama debate? They certainly would not have paid much attention to the verbiage of the candidates (and this would not be because the debate was held in English, instead of German). No, both would have known that truly valuable insights into human character can come only when one “turns down the volume." The words are minor considerations, while the really important messages are visual ones: the slump of a shoulder, the nervous twitch of a lip, the cynical curve of an eyebrow. I wonder if Fox News personalities would cringe if told that their methods were reminiscent of the pseudoscience of physiognomy. It may seem harmless or even commendable to search for evidence of good character wherever we can find it--even in the thrust of a boxy-looking jaw. But we should remember that the original practitioners of this delicate art held that human passions like "vexation" (above) and "hypocrisy" (top) are finite and categorizable, and more troublingly, that race was a determinant of character as well.

Google's "Sea View" and Marine Metaphors for the Web

Calliope — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 20:31:25 +0000

Image Credit: Google Streetview Gallery

Google Maps has a remarkable new feature called Sea View that spotlights oceanic life and space. Sea View is essentially the marine version of Street View, a layer of Google Maps that allows users to navigate though 360-degree panoramic images of the Earth's surface. By extending the concept of Street View to the ocean floor, Google has added six coral reefs to the long list of cities, landmarks and parks users can currently explore remotely, from the comfort of their digital devices. The fascinating images captured so far by Google and its partner, Catlin Seaview Survey, bear out the imaginative quality of the overarching project. It's almost as if Sea View is Google's attempt to fulfill a common childhood fantasy: to experience what it would be like to live under the sea. With its zoomable and virtually traversable underwater imagery, Sea View enables adults and children alike to realize this wish (without having to worry about oxygen supply or the expense of travelling to distant coral reefs).

The look and purpose of these new images disinguish them markedly from the aerial and street views that we normally interact with in Google Maps. Catlin's director told CNN that the goal of the Sea View project is to generate interest in underwater ecosystems and spur the general public to preserve them. The public may have initially used the traditional Street View in a similar vein--out of a sense of curiosity or wonder. But since its debut, Street View's main purpose has shifted to utility; people use the tool because it helps them to recognize the destination they are trying to reach. How pictures of an underwater seascape could ever offer this kind of utility to the ordinary person is difficult to figure.

Image Credit: Google Maps

Thus the juxtaposition of the two environments--terra firma and the ocean floor--within the same, searchable platform (Google Maps) is both striking and a bit puzzling. The screenshot above, showing a bird's-eye view of downtown Austin with its traffic patterns highlighted and sushi restaurants pinpointed, contains a map that is deliberately designed to organize and communicate information. Every pixel is laden with navigational data which may ultimately be converted into cash via ads and sales. The networked surface of the place--stamped with symbols, labels and outlines of the city's infrastructure--looks nothing like the surface of the sea just off of Heron Island, a cay east of the Australian coast. The vista (below) overlooks the water surrounding the island, which is now penetrable to the online world thanks to Sea View. When compared with Google's land maps, the unmarked appearance of this stretch of blue suggests one or both of the following: that something about the ocean actually resists tidy quantification, or, that (at least so far) Google has nobly refused to parcel it up.

Image Credit: Google Maps

Much of the available underwater imagery supports the first conclusion, that marine worlds do not readily lend themselves to virtual mapping and, in general, are difficult to gain one's "footing" in. Take for instance the murky water (below) surrounding Lady Elliot Island, another reef-fringed habitat east of the Australian mainland. The navigational arrows at the center of the viewfinder denote a pathway through the haze, but they do not give the user a sense of where she is going, or even which cardinal direction she is facing. The lurching action that occurs between frames further displaces her in the fog. She feels a bit like Satan tumbling through Milton's Chaos, an "Illimitable ocean without bound, / Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, / and time and place are lost" (PL II. 892-94).

Image Credit: Google Streetview Gallery

Perhaps this is the point of the technology. It seems ironic, but Google might actually be encouraging us to get "lost at sea" through the unlikely medium of a mapping program. As it turns out, the underlying idea that Internet maps and browsers can facilitate tidal drift is not as new or outlandish as one would think. Recall, for instance, the mother of all Internet browsers, Netscape Navigator, whose trademark icon was the helm of a ship. The Netscape wheel was an apt synecdoche for a vessel-like piece of software that allowed users to rove freely around the web. (It was also a tribute to the company's founder, Jim Clark, whose obsession with computerizing a giant sail boat is wittily documented in The New New Thing by Michael Lewis.) Thus, it's possible that Google's dive beneath the waves is part of a bid to take us back to the good old days of internet surfing, which were arguably less about fixing our location--tagging and marking the virtual space around us--and more about exploration and immersion: floating weightlessly like a sea turtle through a vast expanse of images and texts.

Image Credit: Google Streetview Gallery

Everyone's an Activist, All 99% of Us. Right?

Calliope — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 23:34:59 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot capture of photograph by Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

The photograph above was featured this week in The L.A. Times' coverage of the Occupy Wall Steet movement's one-year anniversary. The caption provided beneath the photo states, "A man wanting to join the Occupy protesters on Monday is told to leave Wall Street." The image gives pause, not because a policeman is pictured confronting a protester, but because the man's ethos seems incongruous with that of the anarchist-inspired OWS movement. My recollection of the "Occupied" zone in downtown Austin last winter calls to mind the image of a different kind of a protester, one who looks as committed to battling the elements as he is to changing the status quo. This unidentified man, however, does not look prepared for the scene of mayhem he is allegedly trying to enter. With a cigarette balanced precariously atop his coffee cup, he looks like he's just popped down from the 20th floor to grab some more uppers. It's amusing (or disheartening, depending on your outlook) to imagine him scrawling "99%>1%" on a scrap of paper before venturing into the mob that separates him from the nearest Starbucks. But this is pure speculation. It's equally likely that the man in the photograph is an overworked reporter, or an analyst who has thousands of dollars of debt from student loans. Perhaps he was walking by the OWS demonstration, got inspired, and decided to join on a whim. Either way, the photographer caught him looking weary, unimpassioned, and in a moment of half-hearted negotiation with the police, which is why this photo provides a useful illustration of the phenomenon known as slacktivism.

Slacktivism (slacker activism) describes a distinctly inactive method of supporting a cause. The steps slacktivists take to achieve their supposed ideals require little effort, cost, or forethought (many are easily performed through social networks' approval systems and news/media sharing functions). Despite this, some have argued that the proper channeling of slactivism can lead to positive social change.

I want to suggest, in a very rough and cursory way, that the OWS man's paper-bag appeal to the 99% is similar to slacktivists' tags and tweets. The encompassing nature of Occupy's slogan--"We are the 99%"--has diluted the definition of an activist, and extended it to include anyone with a sign who wishes (temporarily? disingenuously?) to harness the power of an enormous group. Social media platforms can have the same effect. With the right virtual signage anyone can pose as an activist; anyone can reap the social and commercial benefits of participating in far-reaching online campaigns; and finally, anyone can avoid accountability for actions and purported views by maintaining distance between real and digital identities. (I might be accused of doing that in this very blog post.)

Yet on the other hand, the makeshift, handmade quality of the OWS man's sign marks it as an analog, not a digital, production. It has the appearance of a homeless person's battered highway sign--a text that demands attention because of the dissonance between its sensitive message and crude medium (i.e. cardboard). Thus, the OWS protester can claim a certain ethical connection to his sign that is unavailable to wielders of pre-made placards, like the attendees of the recent Democratic National Convention (below). Visuals from the DNC got me thinking about what it means, and what is argued, when one waves around a sign that is identical to hundreds of others nearby, and that was designed, manufactured and supplied to you by a political organization. In the landscape of a highly visible crowd such as the DNC's, one's voice is essentially reduced to one's sign. A crowd that enthusiastically agrees to broadcast a unified and pre-determined message is one that values a brand of solidarity over the opportunity to air personal sentiments or opinions. Or perhaps it is simply made up of individuals who are used to re-posting and re-tweeting ready-made internet memes and allowing those rhetorical texts to speak for them online.

Image Credit: occupyilluminati.com

In light of the eruption this month of violent demonstrations all over the Arab world, the question of how activism can and should evolve seems all important. I won't outline directions for that evolution here. But I will say that the kind of conviction that has mobilized thousands to take to the streets of Muslim countries, recasts the Occupy Wall Street photo (above), along with the possibility that progressive U.S. activism is becoming more dispersed and mainstream, in a sober light.

Startup Channels Candy Land to Explain Itself to the World

Calliope — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 18:10:56 +0000

Image Credit: Appidemia.com

Scrolling through the online list of startups launched this week at Disrupt SF, an annual technology conference hosted by TechCrunch, feels a bit like peering into the future the Web. The catchy slogans and names of companies like Hop.in, Oogababy, and Okdo.it proclaim a new kind of Internet experience, one that is better, faster and more seamless than ever. The only caveat is that many of these startups will not get the chance to impact the Web. Almost half of new businesses fail before they hit their five year mark.

Nevertheless, the roster of aspiring and early stage companies at Disrupt offers a snapshot of where entrepreneurs and app developers think the Internet is headed. Strangely, the success of YourMechanic--which won Disrupt's equivalent of the battle of the bands--suggests that the future may favor internet companies that are simply better than brick-and-mortars at providing access to basic services, like quality auto repair. Yet many of the startups featured at the conference don't bother with the real world at all. A sizeable number are devoted to allowing users to filter, personalize, or simply digest the seething contents of the ever-expanding Web.

Some of these aspiring businesses are strikingly abstract. Take for instance, Appidemia, a not-yet-live social-networking website for sharing and learning about--you guessed it--apps. If you're like me, you might wonder how this process works and how it could possibly be useful to anyone. It seems the founders anticipated utter--excuse me--user confusion since they dedicated the entire background of their "coming soon" page to illustrating--in bizarre, childlike iconography--the platform's central concept. The image below, which appears on the left side of Appidemia's site, seems to portray the mysterious processes of app creation, discovery and bundling, while the segment above (from the right side of the website) pertains to the sharing of said apps with the rest of the world.

Image Credit: Appidemia.com

There are many things to marvel at here: the extra-terrestial setting and its Candy Land-inspired trees, the oozing purple river (or is it an oil spill?), the app-showering hole in the sky, fuzzy cube creatures, and last but not least, the friendly pack of flying fish. The combined effect of these variously endearing, alien, and ominous elements is ambiguous. It seems to hinge on how comfortable the viewer is picturing herself in an otherworldly, inhuman place, and how willing she is to imagine herself engaging--as a prospective user of the site--in the work of manufacturing and re-packaging digital things. Comfort levels, and thus, the picture's appeal would seem to vary with the viewer's prior and/or simultaneous involvement in similar hyper-artificial web environments.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this image is that its purpose--to inform visitors of what the site does by literalizing its procedures--has the secondary, unintended effect of trivializing the whole enterprise of building, investing in, and subscribing to internet services whose sole function is to perpetuate further virtual experience. I would argue that Appidemia undermines its own service, and other narrowly self-reinforcing web services, through a few highly literal aspects of its banner. For one, the apps undergo a very slight change after passing through a giant robot machine; they get slapped together with a few other apps and tied up with a ribbon. So, essentially the site's functionality gets compared to that of a gift-wrapping station. Secondly, the viewer almost immediately transfers sympathy from the fuzzy dice characters to the pictured planet Earth. Not only do we prefer its inviting, serene appearance to the loud colors of the foreground's virtual landscape, but also, we worry that Earth is being assaulted with an app-loaded slingshot! In the end, Appidemia comes off as a factory that doesn't make much, and I want to shout, "Watch out, Earth! The Internet of the future is foisting on you all the apps you never knew you needed."

When does fall start in Texas?

Calliope — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 23:58:28 +0000

Image Credit: Calliope

Growing up in a perpetually foggy area of Northern California, I had a hard time grasping the concept of fall. The Norman Rockwell calendar on my wall told me that somewhere in America, in a land of white-washed barns and copper-colored trees, people spent the fall raking big crispy leaves into piles as geese flew south overhead. But in my neck of the woods, Nature told me no such thing. Where I grew up, the biggest living thing in sight—the redwood tree—remained stubbornly green all year-round. The transition from summer to fall held very few charms besides the distant promise of Halloween. You knew it had happened when the fog began to drip, and didn’t stop dripping until the following summer. As a kid, I didn’t much like our version of fall.

Rain is no harbinger of fall where I live now, in seasonally-challenged central Texas. Nearly two years of extreme drought have erased many of the small changes in temperature and rainfall that normally distinguish the seasons. Still, something in my bones tells me that fall is near.

How do we mark the passing of the seasons? It’s a simple, but nevertheless perplexing question for those of us who live in warm weather communities all over the United States. The Internet—our modern day almanac—can tell us that the autumnal equinox is just a few weeks away. But there are other visible signs of the changing time of year written into our culture, customs, and built environments. A coworker tells me he knows it’s fall by watching his sun-worshipping cats. One afternoon he’ll find them napping in an odd place and realize they’ve migrated there over many days to follow the shifting cast of the sun. Traffic patterns change as the roads accomodate school buses and commuting educators. Then, of course, there are commercial reminders of fall—like the apparently much awaited return of Starbuck's pumpkin spice latte. This kind of ritual, which seem like it's dictated by an out-of-touch corporate diety, feels awkardly mistimed to those of us who are still in the throes of a heat wave. Yet lots of businesses are starting to "bundle up." Despite looking ridiculous to perspiring window shoppers, clothing retailers in Austin, TX have begun to set up painfully ironic displays of their fall lines. The heavy woolen coats on the scarecrow forms below, at the recently opened Billy Reid store on West Sixth, scream "It's fall!" as cars whiz by in 100 degree heat.

Image Credit: Calliope

But even the sacred marketing cycle of the clothing industry cannot impose its seasonal logic on the intractable forces of Texas drought and heat, which begs the question: what kind of fall ritual can be unironic here? The answer, for many Texans, is football season. The game gets played in all kinds of weather, hot or cold, and its fans ring in the season every year with acres of barbeque cookouts and tailgates. As I sat in the stadium with thousands of other fans last Saturday, it struck me that in gathering there for the first game of the season we had unintentionally created an apt visual symbol of fall. Each person's burnt orange regalia contributed to a warm golden glow that circled the entire stadium, evoking an image of fall-colored leaves. The rhetoric teacher in me privately remarked the kairos of this event, the uncanny coincidence of visual symbolism with a deep-rooted Texas fall tradition. If only the bellowing young men sitting behind me had sounded more like the rustle of fall leaves.